Evan sighed. All he was trying to do was make a little money, enough to live and sometimes laugh. But it was difficult being a journalist now. Readers were fighting back. Ever more bizarre punishments were being devised. Writers who took a ‘sidelong look’ were stood sideways on to the nearest wall. And shot with rubber-tipped arrows. Scribes who mused? A quirky view? Retribution was swift, decisive and, if you weren’t one of the people being published, highly entertaining. The punishment for ‘off-the-wall’ was, literally, that.

‘Punished’. Not ‘published’. Punished’. Even Evan’s spell checker was taking the rise now. Then a light went on. A quick 500 words on the difficulties of being a journalist in the online developed world, a wry comment on the similarities between publish and punish, the world and the word…. Then he realised that the light that had gone on was his shed door opening to let in the men with the rope and the feathers.